In response to the growing demand for advanced shopping assistance, Amazon has unveiled Rufus, a generative AI-powered expert shopping assistant that provides customers with insightful answers to a wide range of shopping needs, comparisons, and recommendations.
Rufus is trained on Amazon’s vast product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from the web and launched recently, in beta, currently available only to a pilot group of customers in the U.S. through the Amazon mobile app, but is expected to be expanded to all US customers in the next few weeks.
Andy Jassy, Amazon’s President and CEO says “Rufus is built on a large language model that’s trained on our expansive product catalog, customer reviews, community Q+As, and the broader web—and is seamlessly integrated with Amazon to make it easy to take action in the shopping experience so many customers love and trust.”
Rufus offers a seamless integration into the Amazon shopping experience, allowing customers to ask questions, seek recommendations, and make comparisons effortlessly. It is part of Amazon’s ongoing efforts to leverage generative AI to enhance the customer experience. Rufus joins other AI-powered features introduced by Amazon, such as AI-generated review highlights and Fit Review Highlights, aimed at providing customers with personalized size guidance.
Customers using Rufus can conduct general product research, shop based on occasions or purposes, compare product categories, and get tailored recommendations. Rufus enhances the ease with which customers find and discover products, making it an integral part of the Amazon shopping journey.
The beta launch of Rufus encourages customer feedback, allowing users to rate answers and provide freeform feedback. Amazon plans to continuously improve Rufus by refining AI models and responses based on user input. As the technology evolves, Amazon remains committed to testing new features to further simplify product discovery and enhance the overall shopping experience.
To improve its AI capability, Amazon invested $4 billion in Anthropic, a San Francisco-based startup formed by the Amodei siblings and former OpenAi employees.
